Liner Notes
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Liars On "Army Of Me"
"We were in Belgium when we got this call. I became sleepless with excitement -- tossing and turning thinking of Post. Immediately my brain got stuck on that bass line from 'Army of Me.' All night in my head it went: Duh nu nuh nu nuh nu nuh de Duh nu nuh nu nuh nu nuh ... In the morning when i woke up i was convinced those notes were the same as some Rage Against The Machine song. I told the guys, we thought it was funny."
- Angus AndrewGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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Dirty Projectors On "Hyperballad"
"I think what I took from Björk when I was obsessed with her in high school was her way with deconstruction. She writes these classic melodies but breaks them apart so that it's sort of up to you as the listener to put them back together. The song ends up meaning so much more because of the effort you have to give to it. Out of a perverse habit, I tried to do the opposite with this recording: present the song like the unbroken stone it might have been. But I think I probably just arrived at a new deconstruction: Björk's essence remains elusive!"
- Dave LongstrethGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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High Places On "Modern Things"
"Covering Björk is on par with covering other personal faves such as Morrisey, or Joni Mitchell, i.e., somebody who has become iconic/cult-status to their fans, and who also has such a distinguishable voice. Add to that, a large portion of 'The Modern Things' is sung in Icelandic. We went into it with the idea of somehow making it seem like us (although we experimented with being a little more stripped down, not so noisy/dense as our usual selves), as opposed to trying to do a very accurate rendition of the original."
- High Places"When I was eighteen and living in the dorms at college, my boyfriend would pick me up in his Honda Civic with massive sub-woofers in the trunk, blasting Post. For the longest time, I couldn't listen to the album without feelings of nostalgia for my early college years. But after visiting Iceland last spring and viewing the desolate, wild interior of that country, I now picture the mountain and dinosaurs of 'The Modern Things' living alongside beautiful seabirds and sheep and elves."
- Mary Pearson"I have a Björk dorm memory as well. The first night in the dorms, I made out with someone who felt the first Agnostic Front LP would fit the mood. It didn't go anywhere, but we started a band. A couple weeks later, I made out with someone else who put on Post; definitely a much better soundtrack to a first kiss. That turned into an undergraduate-length relationship. Ever since then, the record's stuck with me. However, Victim In Pain is a pretty good record, too."
- Rob BarberVIDEO: Watch High Places discuss Björk...
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Bell On "It's Oh So Quiet"
"Oddly enough, I can't remember the first time I heard 'It's Oh So Quiet' -- the song has just always felt familiar. Like most of Björk's music, it's been going around and around in various formats, players and parts of my brain since, well, probably since fifth or sixth grade, when everything suddenly became very superlative, urgent and emotional. (With great difficulty I resist punning here about blowing fuses and pubescent devils cutting loose.)Both Betty Hutton's original 'Blow a Fuse' and Björk's version of the song are held together (or not, or barely...) by these crazy pinball shifts, the screaming and the shhhhing, the twinkling and the slamming. I wanted to keep that same energy in my version, so a soft/intimate/acoustic take was out of the question. Luckily I don't have a big band at my beckon call, so the arrangement was free to be completely and incongruously bonkers...
I told [my collaborator] Jason Nazary [drummer/beatmaker] that the choruses would be filled with alarms and crazy sawing synths, while I had this funny Steve Reich vs. Mozart piano idea for the verses. We
spent a few days tinkering around with our laptops, an evening assembling our respective beat/synth/birdie tinkerings, and about a day and a half in a proper studio with my engineer friend Albert, mixing and recording vocals and minimoogs. Happily, nobody blew a fuse."
- Olga BellGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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Pattern Is Movement On "Enjoy"
"Björk's music informs nearly every one of Pattern is Movement's songs. We've always been completely enamored with her ability to combine universe-sized grandness with the intimacy of lips on your ear. We are thrilled to be a part of this love letter to her. Our approach was to substitute the density of the percussion with harmonic and melodious density, all the while maintaining the exotic-groove-with-steamy-organ motif. To us, the end result wound up sounding like Perry Como in the Congo."
- Pattern Is MovementVIDEO: Watch Pattern Is Movement discuss Björk...
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Evangelicals On "You've Been Flirting Again"
"This is a mysterious song, I think. It's unclear who the 'you' in the title is and and the string arrangements hint that lyrics like 'How you reacted was good' aren't quite what they seem. Is this Björk talking to an ex-boyfriend, saying 'hey, it's good to see ya gettin out there and playing the field again'? Maybe she's trying to tell a dude putting the moves on her to be patient 'cause ya know, she's Björk.I'm not sure of her intentions but on the particular night our version was recorded I imagined what if, despite how beautiful the song is, she was really seething at seeing an ex flirt with someone she knows at a party in Iceland. In Björk's version she controls her raging jealousy at witnessing such a a situation, but in our version the narrator (Björk or whoever really) slowly comes unglued and ends up freaking out and going on a murderous rampage at the party. We tried illustrating this with string stabs and creepy 'witch' voices swirling around towards the end."
- Josh JonesGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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Xiu Xiu On "Isobel"
"It is easy, I think, to miss Björk's lyrics sometimes. Not because of any lack of shine on their part, but only because the production and orchestration on her songs is always so unique and wonderful. As much as I love the arrangement of 'Isobel,' it is the, as you might have guessed by now, the lyrics that have killed me. They are, at least as I read them, almost an inward transgendered desperate affirmation and fantasy moth love song.'When she does it she means to' is such a powerstation of 'fuck you, I am on a fit and rampage and destructive sex hyper revelation frenzy.' In it, the line says 'I know what I am doing, I know I have taken it too far, I know that I love my downward and upward spiral. BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ.'For the music Gabrielle Athayde played about 30 minutes of improvised cello, which I edited/arranged in the computer. Ches Smith, wearing head phones, played drums along to an Okinawana folk music record. I bought a new microphone -- that is, for this song appropriately, made of wood -- and sang into it."
- Jamie StewartGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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Final Fantasy & Ed Droste On "Possibly Maybe"
"I realized recently that Björk is probably my most listened to and adored artist thus far in my life. It occurred to me as I was looking back at music I'd listen to in high school and noticing that the large majority of it, even though I respect and love it, I at some point or another OD'd on ... yet to this day I still listen to all of Björk's albums fairly religiously and it was then that I concluded that no other artist in my life has had the longevity that she has had in my listening habits. Covering Björk is a scary task because as both Owen and I discussed, so much of what makes her music amazing is distinctly her voice, and nobody, nowhere can ever really recreate it ... So attempting to was a challenge to say the least.Ultimately I wanted to give it a shot given my life long love of her music, and to boot it was an excuse to fly up to Toronto for a week and visit Owen. Once there we put together some string arrangements and had a string quartet record them in a lovely church I once played at that goes under the venue name of 'the music gallery.' Owen also had a friend that played the oboe, so we decided to enlist his help as well to create a more orchestral interpretation of the song. Owen's other half of Final Fantasy, Leon graciously recorded the song in his new studio he built in his garage in Toronto. Granted the tempo, vocal melody and structure are largely still in tact and as they originally were, we just realized that changing it felt wrong. 'Possibly Maybe' was so perfect as it was, to butcher the up and down melodic tics would be sacrilegious. So for all intensive purposes this was a fun exercise for Owen and I and is very much a cover vs. a reinterpretation. Hopefully some people will enjoy it for what it is, because we certainly enjoyed making it."
- Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear [Photo via out.com]NOTE: Owen adds that Debut was the first CD he ever bought.
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White Hinderland On "I Miss You"
"I didn't grow up listening to Björk, but have always liked whenever something of hers would come on a friend's stereo. The first time hearing this song, I was simultaneously attempting to learn it. I think that leaves little in the way of previous architecture to battle with while making the song "your own." Since Matt's drums were stolen, he ended up using pots & pans for percussion. The rest involved a RCA mic from '52, a borrowed casio SK-1, a distortion pedal, and a suitcase rhodes. Just for a laugh, we also mixed a version where the entire song runs backwards, and I almost sound like I'm singing in Icelandic. We plan to listen to soon while in an altered state."
- Casey Dienel [Photo by Tod Seelie]Get songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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El Guincho On "Cover Me"
"At first, I asked my ex-girlfriend to record some voice tracks for the song and tried to figure out how to fit it with another idea that I had: Like a 6-8 minute trip inspired by the remix Walter Gibbons did for Indian Ocean's 'Treehouse/Schoolbell.' But I ended up discarding the Indian Ocean idea and went a little bit old school UK garage! The other track I was working on sounded kinda similar to the original, like I was looping some all the original parts of the song and using a female voice, too, so I thought it was interesting to try a simple 2-step beat under the same universe, keeping the structure but changing the vocals and the vibe, kinda like dressing Björk in dirty clothes and taking her to the place she's trying to avoid in the lyrics. I am super excited to be a part of this."
- Pablo Díaz-Reixa [Photo by Mawashi Geri]VIDEO: Watch El Guincho discuss Björk...
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Atlas Sound On "Headphones"
"What has always interested me in Björk's music is her ability to change her identity with each album. She always seems to present a new concept and audio-visual presence. My favorite record of hers is Vespertine. I can't help but feel nostalgic every time I hear it. If I had to pick a favorite song it would be 'Undo.' At the risk of sounding trite and overly-sentimental (me?!? trite?!? AND overly sentimental?!?!?) that song makes me cry or at least want to cry. Around the time Vespertine came out, my sister gave birth to twins several months premature, one of the twins - a daughter - lived only a day. It was a very dark time for my family. I listened to that song over and over on an endless loop. I've never listened to music expecting a message or wisdom, but that particular song meant a lot to me and still does. I always wanted to play it for my sister but was afraid she wouldn't quite get it. Björk is an artist I love to admire and follow."
- Bradford CoxGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
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No Age On "It's Oh So Quiet"
"'It's Oh So Quiet' is such an amazing song, played by what sounds to be a full orchestra. Dean and I being only two people had to approach it in a different way. We went more full guitar drums on it, just 'cause that's what we had available to us. I think the original's so incredible, so instead of trying to fit into its shoes, we used it as a jumping off point to inspire us to go towards something totally different. Hopefully it still retains the spirit, but in a different No Age sense."
- Randy RandallGet songs, videos, and posts about this band.
